Pursuit of Afghanistan

Finally had some FtF gaming recently as Jason made it over for Pursuit of Glory. It was a bit tempting to try out Illusions of Glory, but we decided to stick with the game we knew better, since it had been quite a while since either of us had even played it, and we’d need a fair amount of refreshing.

I ended up with the Central Powers, and Jason went with the standard Russo-British Assault opening. I started with Pan-Turkism, and managed to move troops up to the Suez Canal before getting across with Liberate Suez. Both of us got to Limited War on schedule, though Jason didn’t do much in the way of RPs at first, allowing the Russians to get a bit exhausted while I rebuilt the Ottoman army, and more tellingly, he never played Churchill Prevails or Blockade (and Enver Goes East wasn’t as bad as it could be since I’d been largely maneuvering out of contact while he pressed in); neither of us violated Persian neutrality (despite temptations).

The next few turns saw things go very poorly for me. Jason continued being very OPS-aggressive, and eventually pushed aside the few troops I’d let sit in Mesopotamia (at start divisions and two Marsh Arabs). The ANZAC reinforcements made things too dense for me to get anywhere in Egypt, and then he pushed me back out, and the front didn’t shift down there again (Jason admitted after that he probably should have just taken the lumps and gone for it, as not doing it gave him lots of trouble), though I really should have spent the OPS to move back to the two-space chokepoint.

My main problem was Project Alexandria, which came ashore Adana, and with some help from Maude, knocked out my defense. This then turned into an extended hide-and-seek game with Adana and Alexandretta, as I tried to contain him, and he tried to break out into more valuable territory. With the collapse in Mesopotamia, he linked up from there, but it was still too easy for me to potentially cut off his forces from that and the ports. I did retake Adana early on and eliminate the beachhead, which helped.

I had largely felt helpless during this, with no real spare troops, no desire to denude the Russian front, and no reinforcements. I did distract us both with a Persian Push, that took Hamadan, and later Tehran and Qum, but only held Isfahan with the Bakhtiari. I spent too much time trying to keep supply semi-secure before realizing near the end of the day that Afghanistan had a partial supply that could at least keep everyone alive from that end.

I got Bulgaria on turn 3 and held on to it to play on 4. It ended up being a sadly neglected front for too long, but by the end of the day, I had Serbia on the verge of collapse (there were still two reduced armies in Serbia, which I would have probably soon eliminated), and Jason passed on playing Romania on 5. On turn 5, I finally got Parvus to Berlin, so I could start planning for a Russian shutdown (especially since they were far from getting 5+ VPs), and I finally started reacting better to the disasters elsewhere, if a bit too late to really do anything about it.

We went late, but were still in the middle of turn 8 when we broke up. VPs were at 16, and Jihad at 7. I’d just gotten into Afghanistan, and that was probably going to revolt to help take Central Asia with it (I forgot—again—about the immediate roll for entering the region). I had hit Total War at the end of 7, but Jason had barely made any progress, thanks to spending big cards as OPS, and being unwilling to downgrade Invasions to Reinforcements. I still had major military problems, but Jihad was about to go up again, it was likely that Romania would be forced to stay neutral (giving me two more VPs), and I had finally started seeing Reinforcement cards.

Neither of our performances were very good, showing how long its been. I have, yet again, failed to defend against an invasion as the CP. I thought I had him reasonably bottled up, but then he formed the 2nd Indian corps there, and used Maude before I could do anything. If I’d thought about the limited supply for Afghanistan, I could have been in there a turn or two sooner, which could have been interesting.